Interview: Ben Watson, group manager of Adobe's Enterprise Developer Relations department, says the company is encouraging tool development for new vertical segments.Adobe Systems Inc. has captured the hearts of many developers with its PDF offerings. But, like many companies that want to stay nimble, Adobe has realized that in order to keep growing and broadening the capability of its products, it has to tap into that developer community. In late 2004, that need gave rise to the Enterprise Developer Relations department, providing a bridge between Adobe and its developer community. The group's head, Ben Watson, spoke last week with PDFzone about the department's mission, and what its work could mean for Acrobat.
PDFzone: Why did Adobe feel the need to establish an enterprise developer initiative, and what does it provide?
Ben Watson: When we looked at the challenges that developers were facing, one of the major issues was that traditional Web application developers often don't have senior Java developer experience available to them. Since Adobe's intelligent document platform bridges the gap between J2EE and the core infrastructure, developers often need guidance with having Adobe in their existing architectures.
So, we knew we had to provide training and expertise so developers could widen their skill sets as appropriate. The goal of our team is to build out content, provide support and increase visibility to help developers and designers be able to integrate Acrobat into their processes.
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PDFzone: With this drive toward expanding Adobe's reach—by getting developers to build specific tools that build on the functionality of Acrobat—is the company also looking to expand its market beyond creative professionals, and the legal and government industries?
BW: When our team looks at developers, we're aware of where Adobe has had success in the past. But while we understand specific aspects within vertical markets, we're trying to address developers in a broader range of industries. Ultimately, what we're doing is needs-driven as opposed to industry-driven. So, while most of the developers we deal with are in areas like the public sector or financial services, we've seen developer need in many other industries as well.
PDFzone: Since developers in different industries often have different needs, how does your group address the specifics of what they're doing?
BW: We look at the technical information that they might be missing. Our focus is on getting tools and applications into their hands and providing a dedicated support team after delivering those. Adobe has done a great job of delivering specifications. Now what we're focused on is giving developers the ability to integrate what they're doing into third-party applications, something they can bolt on top of the enterprise. The support and tools we provide add on to our platform, so ultimately developers can integrate on top of that platform.
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PDFzone: What kind of work are you seeing developers do as a result?
BW: We're watching most people stretch the boundaries of their applications, and in some cases they're asking more of us than what we can provide. It's challenging, because if you don't have direct experience and aren't familiar with the custom applications that reside in their environment, it's hard to provide context. But most of the time that allows us to uncover real issues that we might not have found. It's these exciting, unconventional uses of our products that help us define a stronger, long-term road map for where we can go in the future.
PDFzone: How does what you do fit into the other work being done at Adobe?
BW: We see it as being integrated into a few different strategies. One is a long-term investment in Reader as a client. Developers are already doing customization in the runtime component, so more and more they're looking at customizing that interface. So, we're making a big investment in Reader.
Also, a lot of work is being done around Acrobat as a professional desktop application, which has very unique requirements for ISVs. More enterprise developers are looking at the interface and runtime to be able to remove requirements for custom coding and allow application ubiquity. That allows teams of developers to work together and more powerfully collaborate. It's also important in how it ties to our partner strategies with companies like IBM. It's important in the developer communities to tie into other communities, and see Adobe interests represented there.
PDFzone: Where do you see your department going in the future? How will it evolve?
BW: I see it as being a really straight line from where we've been, to where we are, to where we're going, in terms of being able to harness the power of enterprise development, and developers' knowledge of various application types in order to build a core platform for business processes. What Adobe is providing more and more is a critical part of that platform with the process-oriented power of a rich application framework that gives developers a new set of capabilities to build and rapidly enable across the platform.
